A short history of true love

Even in an era of speed dating and internet relationships, history's great love affairs have plenty to teach us, writes Amanda Smith.

Even in an era of speed dating and internet relationships, history’s great
love affairs have plenty to teach us, writes Amanda Smith.

The nature of true love was revealed to me at Frankston High School in 1973
where, in a portable classroom next to the bike racks, the genius of William
Shakespeare was unfolded to 35 gormless adolescents.

We stumbled our way through Romeo and Juliet, reading aloud; for the
balcony scene, the part of Romeo was memorably recited by Trevor Giles, the
school burping champion. We were being inculcated into the rich wonders of the
English language: “Look, love, what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds
in yonder east.” What we were really being schooled in, though, was both the
desirability and the impossibility of romantic love. I didn’t get the language,
but I got the message.

The message was that falling in love was easy. It just happened, no study or
training required. Tomorrow, I thought, I could walk into the Police and Citizens
Youth Club, and someone called Shane or Russell and I would fall into an immediate
state of reciprocal desire.

We wouldn’t have to run away or die in a suicide pact. In the olden days when
the play was written, families feuded and marriages were arranged, but not any
more. Me and my Romeo would be free to live happily ever after.");document.write("

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The contemporary irony of romantic love is that the easier it seems, the harder
it gets. We live in a society where we never have been more free to fall in
love with whomsoever takes our breath away, be they married, of the same sex,
or of a different creed or class.

Yet we also live in an age where enduring love has never seemed more difficult
to sustain. We have developed high expectations of what we want from love. The
philosopher John Armstrong, author of The Conditions of Love, says of
our romantic aspirations: “Love is the source of all value. It stands as one
of the great ideals of existence, the lamp that illuminates the whole of life.”

We want love to provide the deepest pleasure and meaning. We want it to last,
but if the reality falls short of expectations we move on, in search of the
real thing.

Taking away the barriers that kept lovers of yore apart has not provided the
key to long-lasting relationships, but it has not diminished our desire for
love and romance either. Nor has it diminished the popularity and imaginative
power of the old stories of forbidden passion. Yet, when our ideal is to live
happily ever after with the one we love, why are our great love stories tragedies?

Romeo and Juliet die with the fresh wonder of their passion intact, before they get anywhere near the boring and tricky bits.

Shakespeare did not invent the tale of the star-crossed lovers, he just did
it better than anyone else. Romeo and Juliet had been doing the rounds in novella
form in Italy, France and England for more than 100 years before Shakespeare
reworked it into a play in 1590-something.

Its enduring appeal lies in its representation of perfect, pristine young love.
Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight, their feelings for each other
are entirely mutual and neither of them has a problem with commitment. They
die with the fresh wonder of their passion intact, before they get anywhere
near the boring and tricky bits. Not for them negotiations over what to do with
the toothpaste cap or whether to have chops for tea.

Romeo and Juliet gives us an image of the gloriously exulted state of loving
and being loved that subsumes all other considerations, even though the play
makes it clear from the start that it will end badly. For them, it ends in death
because they cannot live without each other. For us, the end, if it comes, will
more likely be in separation because we cannot live with each other. What then,
is the continuing relevance and seductive charm of this centuries-old tragic
story?

Romeo and Juliet cannot have the love they want. We have all felt at some time
cruelly treated in matters of the heart. “Why is the measure of love, loss?”,
Jeanette Winterson asks at the beginning of her novel Written on the Body.
This haunting sentence reaches into the pain that the end of love brings. It
encapsulates the horrible paradox that love is most valued in its absence. Even
in the happiest of committed partnerships, there is pain.

Etymologically, we have chosen to forget that passion actually means suffering,
but the old stories remind us of this truth. Romeo and Juliet gives us
a picture of love, however pure and true, that is thwarted. The details of our
own emotional lives may be more confused than theirs, but the pain is the same.
There is consolation and solace in that.

Another consoling aspect of Romeo and Juliet is that the lovers are
not to blame for their situation. They are caught in a family vendetta not of
their making. By the time Juliet realises that Romeo is a despised Montague,
it’s too late. They have already gazed into each other’s eyes and seen love.

This idea of blamelessness is elaborated even more strongly in the older story
of Tristan and Isolde, a tale of fatal passion from the Middle Ages.

Numerous prose versions of Tristan and Isolde first appeared in France
and Germany in the 12th century. Tristan is an accomplished and loyal knight
who is charged with the responsibility of finding and delivering a bride to
his uncle, who is King Mark of Cornwall. The Irish princess Isolde is chosen
and a marriage arranged. Details vary in the different versions, but most rely
on one key plot device: a magic love potion. On the boat trip from Ireland to
Cornwall, Tristan and Isolde accidentally drink this love potion. The effect
is instant and powerful, and the pair cannot keep their hands off each other.

The love potion is the perfect symbol for what it feels like to fall in love.
It is an utterly intoxicating experience. Love also feels like an external force
that is out of our control. It does not seem to be a process of deliberate choice
or free will. This lends a certain amoral power to romantic love.

Isolde, like Juliet, falls in love with the wrong man, but it is not her fault.
The potion causes a passion too strong to be resisted or denied. Although she
dutifully marries King Mark, Isolde continues an adulterous liaison with Tristan
for years. They even run off together for a while, although they can never be
together in any socially sanctioned way. There is much lying, deceiving, pain
and suffering.

We still tell ourselves that love is an uncontrollable force. A common modern-day
scenario is where a married man falls in love with a woman who is married to
someone else.

In the burning need they feel to be together, two families are split apart.
The spurned spouses are thrust into a future they never expected, and the children
must learn to negotiate complicated domestic arrangements and the fraught emotional
terrain that comes into existence between their parents.

Nevertheless, the contemporary view is that if this new couple are really in
love, if it is the real thing, then why shouldn’t they take their chance at
happiness together? Their feelings for each other are more important than the
distress or disadvantage they bring to those around them. Such is the depth
of our attachment to romantic love and its promise of fulfilment that we privilege
it above other considerations.

Until late into the 18th century, marriage in the West was transacted more
regularly for social and economic reasons than because of that strange alchemical
reaction called love. In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, unauthorised couplings
like those of Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet threatened the social
order and so their stories had to end with their deaths. The only consolation
back then was a transcendental reunion of the lovers post mortem.

Over the past 200 years, we have gradually redefined our rights and expectations
about love and marriage to give ourselves greater emotional freedom to seek
happiness in this world, rather than wait for the next. We have done it, though,
by perpetuating the old belief that true love recognises no boundaries or conventions.

As Maria sings in West Side Story, the 20th century musical retelling
of Romeo and Juliet: “When love comes so strong, there is no right or
wrong.”

If West Side Story’s Tony had lived on, would he have felt the same
way about Maria years after the giddy rush of infatuation had died down? Would
Maria still be singing his praises? The point with these sad love stories is
that we never need know.

Romeo and Juliet die with the fresh wonder of their passion intact, before
they get anywhere near the boring and tricky bits.

One pair of history's great lovers who do live to tell the tale is Heloise and Abelard. In France in the 12th century, this nun and monk conducted an extraordinary debate on the nature of love. In 1132, Heloise wrote to Abelard: "God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress, but your whore." This is hot stuff coming from a nun to a monk, but then, 15 years earlier, they had had a love affair that was the sex scandal of the century.

Peter Abelard was a brilliant and dashing philosopher who had been employed by a canon of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris to tutor his bright young niece Heloise. The pupil and her tutor soon added romance to the syllabus. Then, as now, a sexual liaison between a teacher and a student was outlawed (this is one of the few taboos around relationships between consenting adults that we have retained). Heloise becomes pregnant and has a son. In an attempt to appease her uncle Fulbert, the lovers marry, but Fulbert is unforgiving. He has Abelard castrated.

In pain and shame, Abelard retreats into a monastery, where he spends the rest of his life. Against her will, Heloise is sent to a nunnery, also for the rest of her life. Abelard writes of all this in his autobiography, The Story of My Misfortunes. In it he claims that he seduced Heloise for sex alone and that it was lust, not love that he felt for her. He also believes that it was fortunate his testicles had been cut off, because he was now able to devote himself entirely to God.

In her convent, Heloise reads all this and is mightily hurt and angered. She writes a letter to Abelard that begins a famous correspondence between them. She asks him why he has rewritten their history. It was love, she says, and she has never stopped loving him. In one letter she tells of how she still has sexual fantasies about him, during the Mass. He writes back telling her to get a grip and to love God, not him. Heloise has a view of human love that embraces both the sacred and the profane. Abelard believes that God is for love and woman is for sex.

Like Heloise and Abelard, the real-life love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was complex and contradictory. By the time they got together as lovers, Antony and Cleopatra had both been around the block a few times. They each had had other partners, children, careers and responsibilities.

Antony was a successful soldier and statesman by the time he took up with the Egyptian queen in 41BC. Cleopatra had a thing for powerful Romans. Before Antony, she had had a relationship and a child with Julius Caesar. What's difficult to know from historical and fictional accounts of Antony and Cleopatra is whether it was love, lust or ambition that drove them on a crazy course of self-destruction together. They formed a political as well as romantic alliance and took on the Roman navy. They thought they could have it all. They lost the battle and their lives.

While Romeo and Juliet is the greatest teenage love story of them all, Antony and Cleopatra is about a middle-aged affair. For this reason, it's a much more ambiguous and messy relationship.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

Shakespeare's historical source for his play was Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony. Plutarch was a strong supporter of Roman imperialist values, which means his account portrays Antony as a disgracefully irresponsible loser and Cleopatra as a dangerous foreign temptress. Writing some 1500 years after Plutarch, it is Shakespeare who turns them into great lovers.

John Bell, the artistic director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, says that Shakespeare invented a complex psychology for these lovers and that "historically, Cleopatra may have been far more pragmatic and ambitious than Shakespeare makes her". Nevertheless, Shakespeare keeps us guessing about the nature of the attraction between Antony and Cleopatra. "I find love in this play very hard to define. It's certainly a grand passion, but whether it's true love is harder to say. I think that's what Shakespeare is throwing at us," Bell says.

In the play Cleopatra demands to know: "If it be love indeed, tell me how much." Antony replies: "There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned." For him, love has no value if it can be quantified. Antony and Cleopatra are the most extravagant and reckless of all great lovers. Their appetites for luxury items, banqueting and dressing up, as well as for each other, are enormous. This abandonment to sensuality is ultimately unsustainable, but it gives Antony and Cleopatra their timeless fascination.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fell in love while playing Antony and Cleopatra. The 1963 movie Cleopatra has gone down in cinema history as Hollywood's most spectacular folly, and the Burton/Taylor love affair on set was as scandalous as that of the legendary lovers they were playing.

The relationship was a thrilling combination of fantasy and reality and there are many parallels between the two couples. Taylor's excessive number of husbands had given her the reputation as a femme fatale, while Burton was known as a big-drinking ladies' man. They continued to perform their relationship as Antony and Cleopatra.

Their conspicuous consumption and volatile behaviour towards each other held the rapt attention of the media and the public for more than a decade. They were a new kind of celebrity couple cast in the mould of a very old story. Taylor and Burton retain the aura of great lovers. They represent an archetype that has no equivalent among more recent celebrity pairs. Posh and Becks, Tom and Nicole might be remembered as famous couples, but not as great lovers.

Burton and Taylor also played a part in the shifting attitudes to romance and sexuality in the early 1960s. Brett Farmer, who lectures in film history and culture at the University of Melbourne points out that Burton and Taylor got together in 1962, the year that Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl was published.

"Which told us that not only did good girls have sex outside marriage but that they were enjoying it and could be empowered by it," Farmer says.

In 1963, the year that Cleopatra was released, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. In this climate of sexual liberation, Elizabeth Taylor as a latter-day Cleopatra, "was a woman who was very aggressive, even predatory, in her sexuality", says Farmer.

"Part of the fascination with the Burton/Taylor romance had to do with the way it was offering a new model, one which was very different to the domesticated suburban bourgeois marriage which had been the ideal for much of the 1950s."

Nevertheless, the Taylor/Burton model of sexually liberated passion was no more sustainable that of their prototypes Antony and Cleopatra.

Taylor and Burton loved at the vanguard of the progressive social movements of the second half of the 20th century. Feminism and family law reform have brought with them options and freedoms for all of us in the West. This also means that more people are single more often than ever before.

Since couples do not have to stay together till death us do part, there is now a fluid marketplace of unattached people seeking new partners. For some, this is an exciting time. For others, it's daunting and confusing. Finding someone to fall in love with does not seem as easy as Romeo and Juliet made out.

A burgeoning romance industry has responded to this marketplace of need. Introductions agencies, internet dating, and now "speed dating" offer professional help in finding a partner. Internet dating uses the technology of the information superhighway, but speed dating is a peculiarly 21st century concept in a different way. With streamlined efficiency, you get to date 15 people face-to-face in one evening.

In an upstairs room at the Grace Darling Hotel in Collingwood, 40 men and women are chatting away eagerly, if nervously. The sexual energy that's flying around the room reminds me of schooldays with Romeo and Juliet, except here they are better groomed and better mannered than my classmates and I were. The participants are in their 20s, 30s and 40s and they have paid $69 for a Saturday night of speed dating.

The room is set up with long tables. The men are all sitting on one side of the tables, the women on the other. The champagne is flowing. Every eight minutes, a hooter is sounded and all the men get up and shuffle along one place. They then get eight minutes to impress and be impressed by the woman sitting opposite. And so it goes on for the rest of the evening.

After each mini-date, if you want to see more of that person, you indicate your interest by ticking his or her name on your list of dates. At the end of the night, the organisers discreetly provide phone numbers to those who have given each other a tick.

Speed dating comes from Los Angeles. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo as a way for Jews to meet and form relationships with other Jews. It's a new twist on Jewish traditions of matchmaking. Speed dating has extended way beyond its Jewish roots and spread around the world.

Katia Loisel runs Perfectdates, which organises monthly speed-dating nights for straight and gay singles in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. The current popularity of speed dating lies in its efficiency. "Where else could you meet 15 people in one night?" she asks. "You know they're single, you know they're available, you know that they're willing to talk to you. You're not going to get rejected, no one is going to tell you to go away."

First-time participant Trent is a retail manager who works 60 to 70 hours per week, so he does not have a lot of time to work the social scene. He wants to maximise his chances, so at this fast-tracked dating event, Trent thinks he has "got more of a percentage chance to meet somebody nice".

This sprint version of the mating game is brilliantly suited to a culture that breeds romance-hungry, time-poor individuals. This year, Deyo has also published a book on the subject. The blurb for SpeedDating: A Timesaving Guide To Finding Your Lifelong Love says it will take you, "Beyond your first date to help you reach your goal: marriage in the quickest possible time to a person you love who will cherish the real you forever". There's an awful lot of aspiration in that one sentence: I want undying love and I want it now!

We all believe we deserve love. We believe we are all entitled to it. In this democracy of love, we have reformed our society and our institutions to accommodate our most intimate desires, but we have not yet found a way for all of us to find and keep love. Perhaps we have been unsettled by the freedom, however much it is preferred to the sanctions and strictures of the past. Falling in love with the wrong person no longer means making an unauthorised match. It more likely means a coupling that sooner or later fails to fulfil the needs of either or both parties. Even so, we remain remarkably faithful to the ideal that romantic love has the power to transform and give meaning to our lives.

The old stories of great lovers point to a love that will never go away, no matter the obstacles, dangers and threats that are put in the way. The tragic way each of them resolves comforts our own sense of love's difficulties. In the endless telling and re-telling of their stories, the love lives on.

Amanda Smith presents Great Lovers, a six-part weekly series on ABC Radio National, starting tomorrow at 5pm.